DeepQ: Advancing Healthcare through Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality

Quality, cost, and accessibility together form an iron triangle that has prevented healthcare from achieving accelerated advancement in the last few decades. Improving any one of the three iron triangle vertices may lead to degradation of the other two. For example, a policy that increases healthcare accessibility would lower quality and/or increase cost. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR), this iron triangle may finally be shattered. In this talk, I will share our experience of developing DeepQ, an AI platform, for supporting AI-aided diagnosis and VR-aided surgery. I will present two healthcare initiatives that we have been undertaking since 2013: XPRIZE Tricorder and VR surgery, and explain how AI and VR play pivotal roles in improving diagnosis accuracy and treatment effectiveness. More specifically, I will depict how we have dealt with not only big data machine learning, but also small data learning, which is typical in the medical domain. The talk concludes with roadmaps and a list of open research issues in multimodal signal processing, fusion, and mining to achieve precision medicine and precision surgery.